Post by Dracula on Mar 20, 2020 20:06:24 GMT -5
Beanpole(2/23/2020)
Beanpole was widely predicted to win the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard award but it lost last minute to Invisible Life, and having now seen both films I think the jury made the right call. Beanpole is set in St. Petersburg in the immediate aftermath of World War 2 and concerns a woman named Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) who everyone calls “Beanpole” because she’s very tall and skinny. Iya has been left slightly mentally handicapped by a head injury sustained while serving on the front. She’s returned home with a the three year old child of a friend but child is killed in an accident caused by that mental handicap and when the mother of the child, Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), returns she initially seems understanding but over time she sort of goes mad and starts taking out her frustrations on Iya. Now, I’m usually the last person to complain about a movie being “depressing.” Movies get made for a lot of reason and not all of them are supposed to be entertaining per se and some stories are supposed to make you feel bad, and to some extent this is probably one of them, but there are limits to that and this is a story that borders into what they call “misery porn.” The film is meant to about the way veterans came back from the war broken inside and to depict this in an unconventional way but the story they come up with feels fictional enough to be removed from any real experience and in many ways just kind of seems like a cruel story that puts its innocent protagonist through the ringer to no real end. In this sense it almost reminded me of Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (not a movie I like) except it isn’t being made by an infamous provocateur and instead just kind of feels like a really miscalculated movie played sincerely. There is some clear talent on the screen; I liked the performances and thought it conjured the world efficiently and I would be interested to see what Kantemir Balagov can do with different material, but this one did not sit right with me at all.
** out of Five
Beanpole was widely predicted to win the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard award but it lost last minute to Invisible Life, and having now seen both films I think the jury made the right call. Beanpole is set in St. Petersburg in the immediate aftermath of World War 2 and concerns a woman named Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) who everyone calls “Beanpole” because she’s very tall and skinny. Iya has been left slightly mentally handicapped by a head injury sustained while serving on the front. She’s returned home with a the three year old child of a friend but child is killed in an accident caused by that mental handicap and when the mother of the child, Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), returns she initially seems understanding but over time she sort of goes mad and starts taking out her frustrations on Iya. Now, I’m usually the last person to complain about a movie being “depressing.” Movies get made for a lot of reason and not all of them are supposed to be entertaining per se and some stories are supposed to make you feel bad, and to some extent this is probably one of them, but there are limits to that and this is a story that borders into what they call “misery porn.” The film is meant to about the way veterans came back from the war broken inside and to depict this in an unconventional way but the story they come up with feels fictional enough to be removed from any real experience and in many ways just kind of seems like a cruel story that puts its innocent protagonist through the ringer to no real end. In this sense it almost reminded me of Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (not a movie I like) except it isn’t being made by an infamous provocateur and instead just kind of feels like a really miscalculated movie played sincerely. There is some clear talent on the screen; I liked the performances and thought it conjured the world efficiently and I would be interested to see what Kantemir Balagov can do with different material, but this one did not sit right with me at all.
** out of Five
